Bob,
I was about to say that we disagree about rote, but read further, and I think we're not too far apart.

I think memorization is a good thing. I think students should be required to memorize some things. I have an extremely poor memory. It's a long-running joke among my friends and family. Still, it's an important thing.

My point about geometry (and algebra) is that in some cases I've witnessed the teachers attempt to cram too much into the kids' heads by memories. The reason they have to memorize so much is because they don't understand the material. If they actually understood the stuff, they wouldn't need to memorize anywhere near the amount they do. And any standardized tests should be geared towards comprehension, not memorization of minutiae. It's difficult, I know, but not impossible. This is much more true of mathematics than it is for language skills, but I do suspect it's true for language as well.

Your point about the calculators and palm pilots is well-taken, BUT here's an emphasisis by counter-point even to that:

My employer buys me a fairly nice calculator. I use it at least weekly and often numerous times throughout the day. It's a nice scientific calculator, slightly programmable, with a few memories. It was under $60. They've bought me several others (which I've lost or broken) over the years. It varies over time, but I use (at a far stretch) maybe 50% of the functionality of my calculator at the current time. When I was going to tutor these students, they had $150 - $200 calculators. I wondered - what the heck could they possibly be doing that required them to use these things? There would be some trivial problem - by which I mean one could easily solve the entire thing mentally in less than 5 seconds - the kids would whip out these calculators and, after 30-90 seconds of button pushing return a completely ridiculous answer. (They didn't learn to check their answers for reasonableness either.) These same kids were complaining about the incompetence of their geometry teacher, "Why, I got straight As in algebra!" They got straight As in algebra and they don't know how to subtract a negative number? I'm sure they were thrilled with the easy algebra teacher who didn't require them to actually learn the subject. Ninety percent of the time, the problem was not a failure to understand geometry, but a failure to be able to reason algebraically.)


Now back to language. We agree reading is a good habit for kids (and adults). They need to be reading a lot of different things. Classics are very good, but I don't think they're sufficient. They need to see language used correctly and well. I don't know that I agree that Huck Finn is such a great choice. It's not a bad book, but there are better ones I think. I guess I'm opposed to controversy - not to be wishy-washy, but simply to get on with the business of learning. Tom Sawyer has the word nigger "maybe" a dozen times in the entire book. Huck Finn has it numerous times on nearly every page - hundreds, perhaps so many as a thousand references. I can undertand how some people would get irritated at this. OTOH, if people get irritated by Harry Potter in school, I think they should find another book. Get over it, get on with it, and don't get distracted from the primary purpose. The best solution is to find something innocuous for general discussion and then let students find their own books for most of their reading. They should be reading 6 to 9 books per year, every year.

k